Art to Heart Call to Worship

Paul Gauguin: A Vase of Flowers

©2002 by Jeff Dugan

In the 1600s, Flemish still life artists achieved a stunning degree of realism in their floral still lifes that was unprecedented, and has rarely been reproduced since.  The realism is stunning, and the flowers are beautiful, but it’s not the only way to paint flowers.

Here’s the way Gauguin did it two hundred years later.  Compared to the Flemish painting, this looks almost like a paint-by-numbers approach.  But Gauguin’s not interested in photographic realism.  He’s interested in capturing the essence of what beautiful and exotic flowers do to us deep inside.  And what he works with is not the detailed features of each petal and stem, but colors.  The colors are not even exactly true to life, but the way Gauguin combines them together somehow is able to express something about the wild, exotic appeal that all of nature has for us.

Some might be afraid of this appeal, and its link to “uncontrolled animal passions.”  And to be sure, in our fallen world, there’s plenty of danger in abandoning ourselves to base impulses.

But that’s not necessarily what this painting is about.  It appeals to that part of our being that remembers pure pleasure from before it was corrupted by sin – when it was exactly and only what God intended for us.  The sense of desire that this painting awakens in our hearts is the desire to return to Eden and walk with God through His wonderful creation in the cool of the day.

Which is why we’ve gathered here today.  Individually and together, we seek to worship God as purely and sincerely as we can, and inspired by His presence among us, to turn away from the way of the world and back toward the relationship He intended for us when all of creation was new.